A small amount of customers have been complaining about some strange behavior coming from their LED cinema displays recently. This issue coincided with upgrading the Mac being used with the display to OS X 10.9. When the display is connected, both the Mac and the display output flickering video, sometimes coupled with noisy images and graphic distortion.
We recently had one of these problematic displays come into our shop, only to realize that the issue was quite a bit simpler of a fix than we had thought. Not knowing at this point that the issue coincided with upgrading to Mavericks, we immediately assumed hardware when the issue was easily replicated on an in-house test machine.
We’ve learned over the years that with an odd issue like this, it’s always best to check around on some Apple blogs and forums for other user experiences and maybe even a solution. We were successful in finding a very simple solution for this issue, which was a SMC reset of the computer. This is a very user-friendly hardware reset performed by holding a group of keys down.
An SMC reset can also resolve certain power issues (like no power at all). To perform an SMC reset on a portable Mac, observe the following steps:
- Turn off the machine and unplug all peripherals except the power adapter
- Hold down Control + Option + Shift + the power button simultaneously for a few seconds and release
That’s it — you’re done! On a desktop, the reset is even easier:
- Unplug your machine for 10 seconds
- Plug it back in, wait five seconds, and power it back on